NBA players, having long voiced annoyance with media deciding who among them gets to be MVP and Rookie of the Year and whatnot, are holding their own awards show this July in Las Vegas. The categories for “Basketball Players Awards” (seriously) voting were released Monday:
The Basketball Players Awards are real, and the categories are here
Most Valuable Player
Best Rookie
Man of the Year
Best Defender
Global Impact Player
Hardest to Guard
Clutch Performer
Coach You Would Want to Play For
Best Home Court Advantage
Player You Secretly Wish Was on Your Team
It's interesting. The players could have just done their own version of every media award -- and they have a few of those -- but they mixed some superlative-type honors in there, too. It's like the yearly GM Survey or Rookie Survey, just with 450-ish active players rating each other. Those additions -- especially hard-to-define ones like "Man of the Year" -- might hurt any attempt to make these awards a legitimate competitor to the traditional awards, but they make the whole exercise more fun and interesting. And as long as everyone participates, bias shouldn't be a problem.
We’ll all be looking to see how the players’ regular award selections compare to the media’s, but things like “Hardest to Guard” and “Player You Secretly Wish Was on Your Team” best capture opinions players are uniquely qualified to express. I’d love to see “Hardest to Guard” broken down a bit, like “Best Handle,” “Deadliest Shooter,” and “Scariest in the Open Floor.”
The main thing missing is cruel stuff. Because this is run by the NBPA, which probably doesn’t want to foster high-school-style cattiness within its membership, we’re missing really important categories like “Dirtiest Player,” “Most Overrated/Overpaid Player,” “Player You’d Most Like to Dunk On,” “Coach you’d least like to play for,” and “Player you’d least like to have on your team.” ESPN the Magazine has done stuff like this, but with a smaller pool of respondents.
Still, though, these awards are a long time coming, and they offer a welcome complement to the longstanding third-party awards. In future iterations, the players will likely add and subtract from this list to make a solid, worthwhile survey. For now, they just need a better name. “Basketball Players Awards” sucks.
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